More bad news from Kerch

For those of you who have actually been to the Hope Center this news will come as a bit of shock.  I'm in Arizona for the weekend and upon arriving I received a phone call telling us that one of our HC employees was killed in a car accident.  Yuri (or Yura to his friends) was one of our security guards and a staple of life at camp.  His story is amazing and the path he traveled to meet the Lord shows the infinite mercy of our God.

He spent much of his early life in prison for a variety of very serious crimes and that's where he met the Lord.  As far as I know, the Hope Center provided him his first post-prison job.  Yura's first night as a guard at camp he walked the territory and cried at the thought that he was trusted with that responsibility after all that he had done in his life - the Lord had blessed him for his faith.  I was looking forward to hearing his entire testimony when we returned but I won't have that chance.  There's a VHS tape of him talking about himself at camp so I'll have to listen to it and have an interpreter help translate.  

Here are 2 of the very few photos that I could find of him:

Here he's at the Black Sea with us for our post-camps outing.  It was the only time I got a picture of him without his shirt.  His tattoos each have meaning (if you want some interesting reading, check out Russian mafia tattoos on Wikipedia) and are a testament to the life that he left behind.

Anyone that's met him knows the "Yura walk."  He had a distinctive strut that you could pick out from a mile away.  It was something like a cross between a boxer and the gang-bangers in "Blood in, Blood out"

Whenever he saw Cam he would say hello, also in a very distinctive way.  To this day Cam says hello just like Yura.  He usually stayed up at the front gate during the day (since that was his primary responsibility) so the boys would go up there to play.  They knew that was where they could almost always get a little game of 'football' going.

I wish I had more pictures to put up here.  I crave to write more about him but I'm kinda spent.

I know his wife and daughter will never read this but I'll tell them he was a beloved member of the HopeCenter family and will be missed.